(2020-05-19) Condor Gardens And Streams

KicksCondor: Gardens and Streams. Notes on 2020-04-25-AldrichGardensAndStreams. One of the things that I have found, in practice, is that human curation and human moderation seems to be at the heart of what we have to do. You can give me as many automated tools as you want, but I’m still the one that has to choose what’s going to go in my wiki and how I’m going to authorize other users to modify it.

I think this is one of the best messages for the Indieweb community to hear, because there are more and more protocols cropping up as part of the Indieweb suite. But Hypertext 2020 was a big realization for me that Webmentions are often not necessary and may even limit the scope of our conversations.

What’s more: I have a suspicion that people retreat into protocol work to escape from the human work that must be done.

What if the Indieweb is not Webmentions? What if it is simply the work of reading and writing to each other?

Her thought (around the 2hr mark) is that aggregrators like Indieweb.xyz, as they become flooded with input, become less useful at the micro level and become more useful at the macro level.

I think the macro view can be useful to discover new pockets of activity - and therefore to discover new people at the micro level. In fact, unless you are capable of forming a macro view - and of having many subgroups within an aggregator - I think it’s possible that you can’t really discover!

I see the wiki as a story-telling device that reuses older stories to reconstruct new ones; if it is a memory palace or garden (digital garden), it’s an evolving one, toward externalizing the relationship between our sensibilities and cognition.

He then goes on to talk about using ‘gunky’ tags to create hierarchies.

I’m just so with him: our work is to use woefully inadequate (but flexible enough) tools - think of how TiddlyWiki, Webmentions, hypertext, it could all be so much better technologically - but these straightforward ‘gunky’ tools leave enough room for personal human work - to cobble together our own systems to map our stories onto.